Wilson's Second Chance
Wicker, Brian
The '74 elections were not without disappointments. One regrets, for example that so able a person as Governor John Gilligan of Ohio was turned out of office. His defeat is a loss at the state...
...Brave words are heard from a few...
...This is a striking irony, after the election campaign which finished last Thursday with a majority for Labor of three...
...But Maine and Longley may be warning that the establishment parties must put their houses in order and begin to offer some new answers to the problems of the times or else face outright rejection from the electorate...
...If this so proves, it could be the most positive development in American politics since the solidification of the two-party system...
...However parochial, they do have something positive and coherent to say to their little bits of the electorate...
...They claim to be a radical party of new ideas, who have the future in their bones, and who possess the key to a new kind of political set-up in Britain which will ensue when the two-party system has been smashed...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM ENGLAND WILSON'S SECOND CHANCE Harold Wilson has just made a post-election speech calling on the nation to unite in the face of the inflation threat...
...Conscientious Senators, Senator Nelson of Wisconsin being one, do offer legislative medication, such Commonweal: 181...
...I would not like to bet just now on which way it will go...
...Senators will kick around physicians, the courts, war-protesters, abstractions such as high-interest rates, and Madame Gandhi, but seldom do they undertake effective discussions of formative economic forces...
...Whether it is the right policy, or a workable policy, is a different question...
...Hence in a crisis election, when the choice of a government really mattered (as it did this time), they came off badly...
...But whichever way we choose, the face of British politics will be radically changed by it...
...There is no reason why this could not happen again...
...Now there is a woman governor in Connecticut, a woman lieutenant-governor in New York, a woman State Supreme Court Chief Justice in North Carolina, a woman mayor in a city of more than a half-million population (San Jose, Calif...
...Nevertheless, the astonishing victory of Longley ought to place professional politicians on guard: the mood of political dissatisfaction and distrust may extend in the grassroots beyond incumbents to the establishment parties themselves...
...Longley may turn out to be mere sloganeer, a visionary of sorts, a man without viable program...
...The fact is, the Conservatives, for all their claims to be the natural party to deal with the economic crisis, had no coherent economic policy to offer...
...What the electorate has done, one might say, is give itself the chance to say yes or no, decisively, to one issue which matters immensely to all of us...
...It seems as elementary as that...
...For national unity was the principal platform of the Conservative opposition in the campaign...
...They were defeated, not for what they said but for what they did not say...
...We merely have a government which has a policy...
...We prefer to see other forces at work, including a maturing of the electorate with respect to women's total place in politics...
...And the Conservatives were clearly defeated...
...Heath has stopped being the advocate of confrontation politics (as he was in 1970) or has had a genuine change of heart towards the politics of "moderation" and "compromise...
...This is the election to the Maine governorship of independent candidate James B. Longley...
...They had nothing to offer that looked like a total package...
...The Scottish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists are a different matter...
...After hearing Milton Friedman on TV doing a remarkable hatchet job on a group of Britain's most distinguished Keynesians, I have to confess that I'm not sure that the Labor Party is right...
...5 return should not be overlooked...
...Heath's campaign throughout envisaged, was not a call to unite around a policy but a call to get together to think of one...
...The Longley success may not be signal that the time is ripe for a third-party movement...
...But, given the reality of the contemporary situation in Britain, it is probably the only policy that has any chance at all...
...This is not to say that I think we are now assured of a government that has all the answers to the problem...
...They seem to offer a way out of the mess for those who belong to their particular tribe: namely separatism, self-determination, a kind of "national unity" that, however blinkered, does have some roots...
...Maine is still only Maine--a political as well as geographic "outpost...
...His election may be a fluke, and have no implications for the rest of the country, whatever the old political slogan, "As Maine goes . . . etc...
...To the extent that 1974 placed women in fact on equal ground with men in politics, the elections rate as historic...
...Thinking, as distinct from floating, voters decided they could not afford to waste their votes on mere protest...
...But I am sure that, if Labor's kind of policy can work at all, only they can make it do so...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...
...The past was as foolish as it was chauvinist...
...The call for some kind of "National" or coalition government, which Mr...
...Far more people voted for them, I suspect, out of disgust with both main parties than out of any conviction that they have a positive role to play...
...On the other hand, there was the amazing showing of women candidates, a detail, it is to be hoped, which translates to the establishment of women as a numerically significant and accepted segment of the political scene...
...But always their participation, whether elective or appointive, rang of the exception to political rules...
...To have elected the Conservatives would have been to elect a Keynesian government but one that was very unsure of itself, and dangerously exposed on its right flank...
...If the suggestion is that their success is due solely to Watergate reaction, thet~ the showing of women is discounted as an aberration--in which case, Nov...
...Women, of course, have been increasingly a part of the political landscape since the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment on women's suffrage...
...The second thing is that it was not the idea of national unity which led to the Conservative defeat...
...The American political scene may never be the same again...
...He and a few others do criticize weak-kneed federal agencies who have become regulated by the businesses they're supposed to regulate...
...In economic terms, then, the real battle was between a minority of monetarists (who were prepared to allow a major rise in unemployment as the price for beating inflation) and the Keynesian majority who believed that a mixture of measures could be effectively used to do this without these dire consequences...
...Senator Metcalf of Montana does thrash private utilities with regularity...
...Indeed, just now it is clearly more so, since the electorate seems not to have been at all convinced that Mr...
...5 "because for some curious reason women seem less capable of evil in politics than men...
...And their anti-socialism came through far more clearly than their (alleged) radicalism...
...But there is one other consequence of the election which is probably far more important than anything I've said so far...
...The most recent occasion, as rare as a full eclipse of the sun, occurred in early October when the Senate was confronted with an amendment to prohibit oil companies from owning, in whole or part, "super-ports...
...It was not surprising, therefore, that they did well, especially at the expense of the Conservatives...
...Senator Proxmire of Wisconsin does point to the buddysystem of the Armed Services and defense contractors who feed from the public trough...
...Only a tiny minority of monetary theorists, of whom Enoch Powell (no longer a Conservative Party member at all) and Sir Keith Joseph are the only well-known examples, actually presented a discernible alternative to the "social contract" which Labor had achieved with the unions...
...And since 22 November 1974:180 the Labor Party already had one of their own, they were not going to fall for that kind of offer...
...One other Nov...
...Nor should it be...
...They were much more obviously defeated than Labor was victorious...
...just a collection of bright ideas...
...His defeat is a loss at the state level, and also nationally since it depletes the already thin ranks of prospective national leaders--of whatever party...
...What the election has made clear is that the electorate--surely rightly--believe that Labor make better (i.e., more convinced and more competent) Keynesians than Conservatives do...
...Sometimes it is even discussed within the Senate chamber...
...The first is that whatever the "reds under the beds" brigade say, the Labor Party today is just as much the party of "national unity"--or, if you like, of the "silent majority"--as is the Conservative Party...
...This is that we are now guaranteed a referendum on the Common Market membership issue in the next twelve months or so...
...If the two-party system makes sense, so does two-gender participation in governing...
...Usually, the grey-flanneled, muddled-middle, comprising most Senators, does a soft-shoe shuffle around destructive policies of corporate Americanthe oil industry being a handy-dandy example these days...
...The American voter is usually not given to radical departures...
...5 would be a whole lot less significant than some of us would like to believe...
...But political parties have been consigned to death in the past in the United States...
...Two things seem to me to emerge from this irony...
...But in fact they appeared simply as a party of bourgeois protest...
...That referendum, and the campaign leading to it, will surely be a more important, and more interesting, political battle than anything that has happened in the recent election...
...women in some twenty seats of the House of Representatives, and a 36 percent increase of women legislators in 26 of 46 states holding state' elections...
...It remains to be seen who is right...
...The collapse of the Liberals in the election was, I think, fairly predictable...
...I have said that this was an election which mattered a great deal...
...WASHIHGTON REPORT OIL FOR THE SENATE'S LAMPS Occasionally, Senators are obliged to acknowledge brute economic power...
...Columnist Max Lerner has speculated that the public voted so strongly for women on Nov...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 7
